This special issue looks at the normative implications of EU global regulatory efforts in the area of environmental policy. The EU Environmental Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS) represents an example of successful application of EU environmental standards where global standards harmonization had failed. The intersection between EU law and global law, however, seems increasingly porous and difficult to decipher. Post-Lisbon, the EU increasingly functions like a State in its actions with the world. Nonetheless, the operation of international law internally within the EU legal order has been the subject of many distinctive constitutional periods, both prior to and after the Treaty of Lisbon. In the recent judgment of the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice on the EU-Emissions Trading System, the Court rejected claims that the application of the EU-ETS scheme to the aviation sector, specifically US airlines, was unlawful under EU and international law. In the realm of the environment, EU environmental protection is both a value and normative aspiration. Yet what is a successful legal outcome of the adoption of ambitious and aggressive global legal regulatory frameworks in this domain? How should contemporary EU global policy and value ambitions be adjudicated in law? The case raises broader issues about the legitimacy of EU law and externalities arising from extended EU competences to positively promote EU constitutional values beyond Europe. While using this case as its starting point, this special issue sets out to look at the wider constitutional questions asked by it.

The European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is a cornerstone of the European Union's policy to combat climate change and its key tool for the cost-effective reduction of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, according to the European Commission, it is the first and biggest international scheme for the trading of greenhouse gas emission allowances, including sophisticated and far-reaching penalties. Notably, however, the scheme arose out of a failure at the international level to agree on global standards. When an amended directive included aviation under this scheme beginning in 2012, it ignited a global controversy that came before the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice in December 2011. In its decision, the Court and Advocate General explicitly explain that the EU ETS regime arose because of the failure of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) to evolve a global regulatory scheme. To some, the decision of the Court of Justice on the EU ETS represents a definitive view on the legality of the EU's ambitions to uphold high environmental standards and to compel others to uphold these standards also.

Case C350/12 P Council of the European Union v. Sophie in't Veld Judgment of the Court (First Chamber) of 3 July 2014

By taking the EU Cyber Strategy as a case in point, this contribution examines how the distinction between external and internal security in contemporary EU law manifests itself in large-scale risk regulation and in particular, how the EU relies upon external norms to regulate risk. This article also maps the evolution of the rule-making processes themselves.